English 326: Community Writing and Public Culture – The Portfolio Project
In English 326, students work one-on-one with incarcerated youth, helping them create a portfolio of their
writing and art to present to their judges, employers, teachers, and family members. Students go each
week to one of four or five youth facilities. We will be reading from a variety of texts, and students will
keep weekly journals, make weekly reports on their work with the youth, complete a final creative
project, and attend meetings of the Prison Creative Arts Project every other Wednesday night 6:309:00pm.
Interviews are required for admission to the course; students with some experience in youth facilities or
with some understanding of youth incarceration will have priority, but others are definitely welcome as
well — it is interest and commitment we're looking for.
Winter Term 2012
Buzz Alexander
Office Hours:
Thurs. 11:30-1
3275 Angell
Meeting times:
• Tuesday 1-3, 1624 Chemistry
• Thursday 1-30, 1624 Chemistry. January 5, 12 and 19.
• Every other Wednesday, Social Hall, Methodist Church on State
Street, across from North Quad or in 3222 Angell. For the church,
go to back of the church and, once entered, straight ahead. 6:30-9
pm.
• PCAP training meeting, Saturday, January 7, 11-1, Ginsberg Center
(Corner of East University and Hill), lunch at 1.
• Specific portfolio training will be in class January 10.
• Class retreat. We will brainstorm an evening, with food, early in
the term (I may have emailed you all about meeting the first Sunday
of term for this retreat).
• As soon as we are ready, we will meet in small groups (depending
on site, for an hour each week). This will fit our schedules.
• After January 19, we will no longer meet on Thursday.
Books
At Michigan Book & Supply:
• Jimmy Santiago Baca, A Place to Stand
• Geoffrey Canada, FistStickKnifeGun
• Lorna Dee Cervantes, Emplumada
• J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians
• Myles Horton, The Long Haul
• Edward Humes, No Matter How Loud I Shout
• Illustrations from the Inside
• Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities
• Cormack McCarthy, The Road
• Lillian E. Smith, Killers of the Dream
• Simon Wiesenthal, The Sunflower
Course Pack
At Dollar Bill’s, Church Street:
• Calumet Center 2005 anthology, Breaking the Shackles with my PEN.
• Donna Maria Poetry Workshop 1998 anthology.
• Thomas L. Friedman, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, chapters 4 and 5 (pp. 63-109)
•
Ellie Wiesel, Legends of Our Time.
“Appointment with Hate”
“A Plea for the Dead”
SITES (we must have at least one portfolio person at each site)
• Holy Cross Children’s Services, Boysville Campus: A boys’ facility. They are usually
interested in an art as well as a writing portfolio. The drive is 35 minutes each way.
• Calumet Residential Treatment Center: This is a boys’ facility. The drive is fifty minutes each
way.
• Lincoln Residential Treatment Center: This is a boys’ facility. The drive is fifty minutes each
way.
• Maxey Boys Training School: The drive is fifteen minutes each way.
• Thumb Correctional Facility: This is where male youth who have been sentenced as adults are
housed. The drive is an hour and twenty minutes each way.
• Vista Maria: This is a girls’ facility. The drive is forty-five minutes each way.
• Central High School: Writing portfolio with a girl.
• Cody High School: Writing portfolio with a boy.
Schedule:
January 5
January 10
January 12
January 11
January 17
January 18
January 19
January 24
January 26
January 31
February 7
February 14
February 21
March 6
March 13
March 20
March 22
April 3
Introductory meeting
After some talk about the course, we’ll start sorting out schedules and where people wish
to work. We need to move very quickly, because it can take a while to get inside. Begin
reading for the course.
Vanessa Mayesky, Coordinator of the Portfolio Project, and I will be doing the portfolio
training with you.
Savage Inequalities
Orientation at site
Open session*
Orientation at site
FistStickKnifeGun
Open Session Note: Journals come in for the first time this week.
No Class Thursdays from now on. Instead, one hour meetings by site each week.
Note: We will discuss poems from Breaking the Shackles with my Pen and from the
Donna Maria Poetry Workshop, as well as Illustrations from the Inside during site group
meetings.
No Matter How Loud I Shout.
A Place to Stand. Five poems from Emplumada:
“Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway,” “For Virginia Chavez,” “From Where We Sit:
Corpus Christi,” “An Interpretation of Dinner by the Uninvited Guest,” and “Poem for the
Young White Man Who Asked Me How I, an Intelligent, Well-Read Person Could
Believe in the War Between Races.”
Waiting for the Barbarians
The Sunflower and “Appointment with Hate”
Selections from Hot, Flat, and Crowded.
The Road
Open session
Horton, The Long Haul and “A Plea for the Dead.”
Killers of the Dream, pp. 11,190, and Emplumada: “Lots: I,” “Lots: II,” “ For Edward
Long,” “Caribou Girl,” any others you’d like to discuss.
April 10
April 17
April 22
Open Session
Open session
Evening meeting at Buzz’s house, final creative project and good talk. Come with food to
share at 6:00, and we’ll start in with presentations by 7:00. Be prepared to stay as long as
it takes (10-11) – it’s an evening we’ll be very ready to have time with each other.
* During open sessions, we will feel out what it is we as a group need to talk about, what our pressing
issues are, and we will go with that.
The Work
1. You will go once a week to one of our sites and work with an individual boy or girl,
assisting them in creating a portfolio of their art or writing. In most cases, you will drive
together with the others working at the same site – we will try to arrange both schedules
and cars in a way that will enable that. But there may be exceptions, either because of the
number of portfolios at a site or because of your schedules. You will make a regular
though brief report – over e-mail - immediately after each session. You will also meet
with me once a week for an hour, usually with the others going to your site.
2. We will talk together about what happens in your first and subsequent meetings with the
youth, and we will have materials for you to read and draw upon. You will want the
youth from the start to understand that the project is about their work, what they want to
say or express. From the beginning we let them feel our respect for who they are and for
what they are going to do in the space we are lucky enough to share with them.
3. The process of our work is most important, that is, how we communicate with the youth,
how they learn technical skills and pride in their abilities to create, how they grow and
feel supported through the work. But almost equally important is the product, both the
portfolio and the presentation of their work before an audience at the end of term.
4. You will have an orientation with our liaison at the site and will wish to stay in touch
with that liaison as things come up, or just let them know on a regular basis how things
are going.
5. At the end of the term, you will present the youth to an audience at the site and he or she
will show their art or read their poetry. Often this happens on the same occasions that
one or two English 319 workshops are performing or presenting their work. We will try
to get this scheduled as far ahead as possible.
6. A highly recommended experience. Invite your liaison (and others from the facility) to
dinner. S/he has been working at the site for a significant amount of time, has made
commitments, has a range of experiences (good and bad), ideas, and aspirations, and had
done significant thinking about what it means to work there and about the social context
in which s/he is working. And you’ll have a lot of questions. You’ll learn a lot.
The Course
1. I am facilitating the class, but expect everyone to facilitate, teach, and coordinate. We
want to be a tight group, to stay in touch with each other and with what is happening, to
work out problems as soon as they are identified, to have a good time together.
2. Reading assignments. I have combined reading that will be helpful in thinking about the
circumstances of the youth you are working with with some novels, essays, and poems
that will be challenging to us. We will see how things go in terms of developing our own
themes as a class and can make some adjustments in the schedule as we go
3. Written assignments: During the term you will keep a journal on your experience
working with the youth, your experience at the site, on the reading, the class, anything
else that ties in for you - I will read your journal and write something back every week.
You may take three weeks off from the journal (not three weeks in a row and not a week
in which something seriously problematic has come up for you). Journals begin the week
of January 24. You will have a total of eight journals. The final journal will be the week
of April 11. Journals can come in in class, in small group meeting, or be put under the
door of 3275 Angell. If a journal comes in after 5:00 pm on Friday, it will be read but
receive minimal or no response.
4. Your final project. On Sunday evening, April 22, we will gather at my house, with food
and drink. You will present a creative project of your own (a song, a sculpture, a
drawing, a poem, a dance, etc.) which will reflect and in some way be analytic about your
experience with the youth. You will also turn in at that time a four-page informal paper
(informal = just sit down and write intensely, not worrying about structure, spelling,
grammar) which reflects on your creative project.
5. Grades. I assume that you will get high grades for the course, because of your
commitment to the work. I also expect you to be at every class session and every site
group meeting, to have your journal in each week (except the three weeks you have off),
to have the reading done, to participate fully in our discussions, and to be fully engaged
with the youth (for me this is very important) and not let them down. If this isn’t
happening, the grade will go down.
Note
The facilities expect you to lock your car. You will be parking in secure parking lots, and I’ve
never heard of theft from a car at a juvenile facility, but it is generally a good idea (wherever you
are) not to leave anything visible inside the car.